Marrakech founder offers unlimited cheap data storage with Gridstore

01 March 2009  By Gavin Daly

The founder and former chief executive of dotcom casualty Marrakech has re-emerged with a new business backed by heavyweight figures in the technology sector.

Kelly Murphy has attracted Iona Technologies founders Chris Horn and Sean Baker, and Paul Kerley of software firm Norkom, to his new business, Gridstore. The company is operating ‘under the radar’ while it develops a next-generation data storage system.

Brian Caulfield, a serial entrepreneur and former venture capitalist, is also a shareholder in Gridstore. Other shareholders includeAntoni Sawicki and Thomasz Nowak, who is based in Warsaw. The directors of Gridstore are Murphy, Horn, Baker and Sawicki.

Gridstore and a related company, Gridstore Ireland, were incorporated in January 2007, according to filings at the Companies Registration Office. Shares in Gridstore were allocated to Horn, Baker, Kerley and Caulfield earlier this year.

Technology industry sources said the company was working on a system that would offer unlimited data storage capacity for a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. According to the Gridstore.com website, the company is "in stealth mode".

Murphy previously founded Marrakech, which developed an online trading system for large companies. The company was launched in 2000 after two years in development, and attracted about €70 million in funding from a range of venture capitalists, including Doughty Hanson and Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.

Marrakech employed about 250 people in Ireland and overseas at its peak, but struggled to raise revenues and never made a profit.